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1. The game is not historicly accurate and they took liberties to make a class system possible that's close to what everything D&D inspired.
2. Shields would be more annoying that anything else. And doing a Battle Brothers lookalike would also be pretty dumb in terms of gameplay, since Battle Brothers isn't "famous".
3. If everything was realistic, you would have way more gear on everybody : Secondary weapons, knives and daggers in plenty and so on, shields as you said etc. Which would probably make classes redundant. Now you could do things like princeps having better shields and so on, but that would create either a game where you wouldn't use shield on class that could because it's bad, or shields are redundant.
You need to take into account that historical accuracy isn't always working in the line of : does that make it fun ?
Exactly.
One of the problems with Vikings was that the shields made the combat one dimensional. Everyone had to have a shield to protect against archers and everybody who wasn't an archer had to have a shield yank ability. Yank enemy shield > whack enemy/shoot enemy > done. The combat was mainly limited to shield yanking and archer hunting.
Rome has fewer shields but better shields, pillums (zero AP anti-shield), princepes that can do a lot more than heavies in Vikings could and veles class that is a lot more versatile and interesting to play than what we got in Vikings. Big upgrade in combat game play and to hell with historical accuracy if it gets in the way of better game play, I say.
OK, but a similar based-on-history-but-not-that-historically-accurate game, by the same devs, Expeditions Viking, had shields for everyone except those that used two-handed weapons.
Veles and Triarii may dual-wield or use two-handed weapons if they want, making these similar to the spear users or dual-wielders of Vikings - but in Vikings there was at least the option to use shields.
Apart from the "historical accuracy", it would have given us more options in combat. Not that there aren't a lot of options already (including a fair few OP ones), but still...
Really? WOW. Thanks for that, because I thought it was a fully-realistic immersive simulation of ancient battlefield tactics! Thanks for clearing that up!
Marian reforms occurred after the timeline in the game, so that's not even slightly relevant.
Previous game in the serious had shields everywhere, with similar capabilities (in general). Though it also had ridiculously powerful arrows, which made them pretty much essential.
They could have had both. For example, flanking someone could have made the shield ineffective (e.g. they could have had it so that shield-users can only protect from one attack in that case, or only attacks within a certain arc of the first - like already happens sort of with that one shield skill).
Vikings definitely lacked an ability to do away with shields that didn't involve either yanking it away first, or using the dual-wielding one-two skill. They should have at least made two-handed axes proper shield-breaking. Rome did have a % chance of the shield working based on stats/skills though, so unless the enemy + shield was end-game, you could brute-force your way past it eventually.
Rome doesn't suffer from that though, since we have pila to take down shields. And they don't necessarily have to make all shields equal - veles shields, being smaller, could perhaps be far less useful against arrows for example (only small % chance of blocking arrows instead of 100%). And they could have made shields have a chance to block overall, based on stats/skills/shield type/number of attack directions/etc.
1)For the record... Marian reforms happened in 107 BC. That's roughly half a century prior to Expeditions: Rome and also part of the reason why the legion kind of follows the rules set by Marius.
2)At the time Expeditions: Rome takes place there are no Principes, Triarii or Velites. And Sagittarius wasn't even an actual class in the Roman legions... ever. And when you think about it nobody in the game ever makes a reference to somebody's class. These are just thematically appropriate titles we chose so people can have a vague framework in their minds for who's who... There are other subtle discrepancies we chose to introduce for the sake of clarity. e.g Legion colours and symbols were also standardized during the Marian reforms, yet in our game Prima Italica and Victrix have different symbols.
3)Shields saw a lot of revisions throughout the development. On the one hand we did not want the usual gives-you-1-bonus-AC shields most RPGs have, on the other hand we did not really want this to become Expeditions: Shield... We also wanted to keep things simple in this already complex game and attack rolls not be a part of the game. Each class corresponds to a certain tactical archetype and certain fantasy. Using a shield (which is significantly more powerful as a tool In Expeditions: Rome than most other RPGs) is the domain of the Princeps, the most "roman" of the classes in the game.
In short, it's a design choice. The way the game works this way is the way we wanted it to work.
4)As an aside... (because I see this point coming up a lot even when people are trying to defend Expeditions: Rome)
Expeditions: Rome is NOT a documentary. Several things happen not the way they actually happened. But that doesn't mean Expeditions: Rome is "speculative fiction" (which is a catch-all term for Sci-Fi and Fantasy fiction and similar genres). Expeditions: Rome is certainly not an "alternative history" story.
An alternative history narrative would need one big, significant event that would change the whole fabric of society (what if WW2 never happened?) and then examine the ways the society has changed. Sure in Rome a certain important historical figure dies very early in the game but the story is about the direct results of that event. By that point in Expeditions: Rome fictional events were already in motion. And that's what Expeditions: Rome is...
Expeditions: Rome is a work of fiction with a historical background. Fiction happens when we depict events that could have plausibly happened but really didn't happen. So yes, events and certain elements in Expeditions: Rome may not be historically accurate. That's because, once again, it's neither a documentary nor a simulation.
Expeditions Vikings, by the same devs, wasn't historically accurate either, and still had something like a class system (it didn't actually have "classes" per se, but it had skills such that that's what you'd end up with). And still had shields everywhere.
Again, Vikings had shields, didn't make the game annoying because they had counters. Rome actually has more counters since literally ANYONE can equip a pila, or pick one up from the battlefield even.
You would have MORE gear on everyone? How much stuff do you think people carried around back then?
They would have a main weapon (sword/spear/bow), backup weapon (usually some kind of dagger), non-bow-wielders would have a shield, and some of those would have 2 pila on top of that. Not sure where you get the idea that people back then carried vast amounts of weaponry on them into combat. The characters in Rome no doubt wield more weapons than would have been the case.
More, the tip on the loading screen gives a hint about a Marian legion of 4800 fighting men.
For me, class names are more like 'flavour' than actual legionnaire specialisation. Yet this caused me some trouble with choosing the class to play. The only true candidate for a legatus would be a triarius, not some poor youngster veles or foreigner auxiliary sagittarius ))
Thank you for the detailed response. LOL at myself for getting the dates of the Marian reforms wrong - not sure what I was thinking... Probably because I read the "class" names and automatically equated them to pre-Marian-reform "classes".
I never expected 100% historical accuracy - if so then I would have complained that the main character would almost certainly come from the Equites (post-Marius, this was still the case I believe?).
Agree shields are even more powerful here than in Vikings, where there were chances you could bypass them. IMO it would have been better to keep a similar system - I can understand wanting to reduce "attack rolls", but we DO actually have something similar - the "grazing hit" mechanic with respect to armour... So....
Related to that, in general I really like the way armour works in this game, even if there are many early armour items that don't actually give you any "armour" points as such (my only issue with the armour system really - the % chance of graze thing combined with the direct damage reduction mechanic is a good one IMO).
As to the "alternative history" explanation, technically speaking it can be multiple events that are different - not just one. However given that the game doesn't exactly fit into the "simulation" category, it'd technically be "low-fantasy" or something? Whatever the technical term is for "a story that takes place in ancient times but without magical ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, with the exception of when characters are tripping balls".
Yeah I know, stupid me got the dates screwed up. That or I just saw the "class types" and blindly assumed pre-Marian...doh.
Agree with the second point - at first I was thinking that realistically only a Triarius would make sense. Then again, Legatus comes from the Senatorial class, which would mean he'd be an from the Equites (but of course that couldn't really be represented in the scale of battles in this game). Probably would have been better if they didn't even have classes at all, and just kept it totally free-form like Vikings, and have stats and grouped together skills instead.
But Triarius seems to be the only one that seems "logical" to pick as a leader anyway, due to the leader-style skills he has.